Would you care to explain a bit as to the where, how, why and when?
IOW, the basics of the thing.

The where is here, the when is now (well, from my point of view). The how and why are indeed more obscure.

The why.
This is not really meant to be a composition, its more like an electronic étude.
Getting to know a new instrument like the G2 is quite a job. My estimate is that it takes me on average some two years to get to know an instrument in a way that I feel very comfortable with it, and using it becomes like a second nature. The way I go about is check out techniques, if I can patch them on the G2. And how they work out on the G2.
(There's some fifty years of electronic music and there is an abundance of electronic music techniques developed in this period. Interesting thing is that most basic techniques are already from the fifties and early sixties. Most things considered groundbreaking today were already described and figured out in that period.)
So, getting to know an instrument like the G2 is first getting to know the modules, but that is not much of an issue for me personally. But still important, like taking one single module and for a week use it in different ways until you feel what it does. Techniques use sets of modules in some configuration for some particular musical purpose and mostly I pick a technique and can be busy with it for months. Then comes the composing, with the techniques.
Btw, I'm not a keyboard player, consider me more like a 'tape artist'.

So, the why is simply that I was working on some techniques and when adding them in a performance they just produce some sort of ambiance that I felt wasn't too bad.

What I'm after musically is creating 'ambient structures', without beats and without melodic structures. Perhaps a bit what Eno did in the seventies, or better the Hafler Trio. Which I want to combine with Terry Riley-style tape techniques (check'em out in Google). Anyway, more strict than e.g. Aphex Twin's 'Selected ambient works' and the like, as I don't want to use those thick synths, choirs or reverbed glockenspiels playing muffled melodic structures. I've always felt that using those type of sounds is 'over-easy' (imho!).

The 'how' is basically technical babble.
In slot2 I was experimenting with a 'clocked up/down' counter clocked at audio rate by two different clocks, in this case almost but not exactly an octave apart. The output controls a CtrlSeq, which sort of provides an output waveform, then extracting the transients which excite a resonant bandfilter, the odd/even distortion described somewhere else on this forum and some resonating delays for the timbral shaping, to give the sound some body.
The 'up/down counter sound generator' has feedback to its own frequency control. Which is a technique that potentially produces chaos, like the chaos in deterministic systems with nonlinear transfer functions. Very similar to how noise is made in a FM synth. I found that in this particular case it creates interesting 'clusters', that alternate between like 'someone is freaking out on some electric guitar or electric violin or something' and more regular sort of pulse trains.
The trick of a chaotic system is disturbance. The system is in a certain 'stable' state and to get it into another state the system needs to be disturbed. Interesting are self-disturbing systems, they can take on a life on their own. I guess this one is close.
The chaotic behaviour is a bit tricky on a digital system, the reason is that the anti-aliasing actually influences the feedback as anti-aliasing is superimposed on the proper feedback value in a non-linear system. But writing on this would take me a few pages, I guess.

Then I was experimenting with the delay lines. The idea was that it should be possible to lenghten the delaylines by multiplexing two '48kHz samplerate' signals together into one signal at 96khz and feed that through a delay line and demultiplex this signal after the delay line into two signals again. This should work when there is always an even number of samples in the delay line, as otherwise the two outputs would swap for odd and even numbers of samples in the delays, which you get when modulating the delay time. Jan Punter came up with the bright idea to use two delay lines in series and control them with the same control value. Which happened to reveal some 'rounding error' bugs in the delay lines that got solved in the OSV1.22 release. So, in slot3 two 'one second' delay lines produce one 'four second' delay like where the audio runs at 48kHz through this delay line. Does work now, great.
Long delay lines need to be modulated by a very slowly changing control signal, the longer the slower. You either have to slow down the speed or reduce the amplitude of the modulating signal (which is basically a FM modulation index issue). Here the modulation is the full four second range, so it is very slow. Which does nice things to a sinewave with a steady pitch. In the past you could do this with a tape loop on a recorder with speed control. Which is one thing I'm after, to be able to do the various traditional tapeloop techniques on the G2, see the Terry Riley reference.

Another thing is how to breath some life into low pitched drones. Again I'm after chaotic behaviour, like how nonlinear deterministic systems can produce chaos. A phase modulation FM oscillator is potentially chaotic when selfmodulation is used, as then you get a function that contains a sin(z) = a*sin(z-1), which is nicely nonlinear.
Chaos is all about nonlinear feedback functions that create bifurcations, dusturbances etc. When the chaotic oscillator shows a 'period doubling' you actually make the oscillator go to a lower pitch on a 'subharmonic' scale. It is the second and third subharmonic, so pitch/2 and pitch/3 that are of most interest in low drones. To get there, a four pole filter set to below the osc pitch can be put in the FM feedback patch and the feedback level tweaked until one hears the first period doubling (the phase shift of the four poles adds nicely to the effect).
The interesting thing about chaotic behaviour is that there is (always?) a transition period between two stable states (also named 'strange attractors'). When the system is disturbed and it seeks a new attractor it will always pass through such a transition. The low drone is disturbed by either changing the filter cutoff in the feedback patch or slightly changing the level of the feedback signal. This way the waveform 'drifts' between the first period doublings, which imho sounds nice for a low drone. Feedforward from the input of a FreqShifter to its outputs creates a nice stereo phasing 'rotary' effect, which I like much more than a chorus on a low drone. Thanks to Harald Bode (another genius worth checking out).

The rainy sounds in slot1 is just the sort of noise I like.

Aah well, I could perhaps write pages and pages of technical babble, but I guess this should be enough. The 'why' is definitely more interresting. What I like about this chaotic structures is that its much like 'free jazz', the idea that these modules play free jazz all by themselves.

It's a nice one, all kinds of interesting patterns keep on going that make me pay attention.

About the transitions from one attractor to another I'd say there always is a transition period indeed. Maybe not stricly mathematical (although it seems easy to generalize a transition length of zero into the concept) but we (the listeners) always need some time to discover a new pattern.

My reasoning is that a system has a memory of it's previous pattern (otherwise it would not be able to play patterns at all) that can only gradualy be changed into a new pattern.

Now the pattern change could be very simple, like flipping one bit, but that would only be a special case having a very short transition time.

Hmmm. I thought I already responded to this but must have forgotten to push the submit button.

This is really cool. I think Slot B is really cool. Quite a gem in itself. This shows what a great thing the fwd/rev stepper in the wish list would be, or even a simple fwd/rev button on a regualr sequencer. Good show, Rob.

Interesting thing is that most basic techniques are already from the fifties and early sixties. Most things considered groundbreaking today were already described and figured out in that period

Absolutely. My old books on electronic music are very useful now.
I remember visiting the Sonology institute in Utrecht. I think it was mr. Tempelaars himself who showed me and a fellow student the original VOSIM device. A cabinet high 'computer' and it was doing a reasonable imitation of a clarinet sound.

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